The blurring line between freelance journalists and self-employed media workers

Abstract

This study uses the question, ‘what makes a freelancer specifically a journalist’ as a starting point for investigating the ways Australian freelance journalists experienced and managed precarious employment in COVID-19 impacted 2020. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 32 self-identified freelance journalists, we analyse the types of work they did, the influence of the precarious job situation on their work choices and the consequent ways they chose to display their identity as journalists. Our findings reveal a complex picture, which calls into question some of the binaries established around journalism. While nearly all participants had to resort to work outside journalism in 2020, at least half still displayed strong links to journalism, demonstrated by their sense of belonging to a community of journalists, and their continued interest in doing self-funded public interest journalism as ‘passion projects’. However, we also noticed a blurring between the descriptors of journalist and writer, based partly on employment opportunities but also, importantly, on interest in increasing creativity in the journalistic space. These results lead us to question work-test definitions as a signifier of a freelancer’s bond to journalism and to propose, instead, that freelancers merit a new standing in the flattening hierarchy of journalism.

Introduction

Freelancers make up a rising portion of journalists at a time of media industry contraction and reconfiguration and this trend has increased scholarly attention to what was, for a long time, a neglected and marginalized group within journalism studies (Bromley, 2019; Deuze & Witschge, 2020; Massey & Elmore, 2018). In the recent research on freelance journalists, most attention is given to the challenges of precarious employment and livelihood (Gollmitzer, 2019; Hanitzsch & Rick, 2021; Örnebring, 2018). Our study further develops this theme to include analysis of how the precarious job situation in journalism influences freelancers’ work, and the ways they display their identity as journalists. Drawing on 32 semi-structured qualitative interviews with freelancers, it identifies and discusses the implications of the broad diversity of types of jobs that Australian freelance journalists do, both inside and outside journalism. The findings are marked by the timing of our research, which was carried out in October–November 2020, at the height of the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. In Australia, similar to the United States and Great Britain, the media industry’s advertising market collapsed, precipitating publication closures, massive job shedding and suspension of freelance budgets (Dawson et al., 2021; Samios, 2020). In this context, many freelancers lost their regular contracts and had to resort to jobs outside journalism, although this pattern was already established prior to the pandemic.

Importantly, what sets our study apart from most other enquiries into freelancers is the fact that we did not choose our participants strategically, purposefully or randomly (see Mathisen, 2019; Marin-Sanchiz et al., 2021; Norbäck & Styhre, 2019; Salamon, 2020). Instead, our participants opted into the study as self-defined freelance journalists. In Australian universities, human research follows ethical guidelines, set out in the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (NHMRC, 2007), that stipulate participation in research should be voluntary, based on informed consent and mutuality, and made without overt coercion or subtle pressure (Researching Freelance Journalists). These requirements of consent favour indirect recruitment strategies. To comply with this request, we used high-profile freelance networking sites to circulate an open invitation to participate in our study of ‘Australian freelance journalists’. Our sample therefore consists of participants who responded to our call-out, met the recruitment parameters and agreed to participate in the research. At interview, as we explored their experiences of freelancing but desisted from taking detailed data, multiple interpretations of ‘freelancing’ as a category of journalism emerged, and this prompted our further interest in exploring the ways freelancers display their understanding of being a journalist. We will be measuring this understanding against the core values in journalism’s consensual occupational ideology as outlined by Deuze (2005).

Massey and Elmore (2018), in their entry in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication on ‘Freelancing in Journalism’, raise the problem of distinguishing freelance journalists from self-employed media workers, without attempting to resolve it. Instead, they indicate that among scholars there is little consensus about ‘what makes a freelancer specifically a journalist’. All the same, they mark the distinction as a question that matters, ‘especially with research studies of the unique journalistic facets of the freelancer’s work and life’ (2018, 2).

Our search for the journalistic facets in freelancers’ work, however, is not driven by wanting to establish boundaries between journalism and non-journalism. Interviewing freelancers at a time when they evidently also held other jobs, made us search for the reasons why they chose to self-define as journalists and what this tells us about their perception of journalism. We wanted to know about the kind of work our participants were doing, and had done, and how they saw their work relating to journalism. While expecting to find answers to our participants’ modes of financial survival, we expressly tried to capture the freelancers’ understanding of journalism and how their views indicated shifts in the conceptualization of journalism.

Researching freelance journalists

Self-definition is broadly understood as an individual’s identification with an ‘in-group’, with the identification being shown most clearly in the positive feelings about the group and one’s membership in it (Leach et al., 2008). The specific appeal of self-definition as part of an ‘in-group’ of journalists can be seen in census data (Høvden, 2008; Josephi & Richards, 2012). The census, conducted five-yearly by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, always records a high number of journalists, based on self-definition, in the broad and open-ended occupational categories used to measure the sector. Under the banner of ‘journalists and other writers’, the ABS groups together copywriters, newspaper or periodical editors, print journalists, radio journalists and television journalists, as well as journalists and related professionals ‘not further defined’ and journalists and other writers ‘not elsewhere classified’ (Josephi & Richards, 2012).

These figures, interestingly, do not parallel the scale of newsroom lay-offs in Australian journalism over more than a decade, as O’Regan and Young show in their article ‘Journalism in numbers’ (2019). The authors separate out the Australian data to reveal that, after recording the highest number of journalists in the workforce in 2011, there was negative growth of only around four percent for print journalists in 2016 – despite over 2000 newsroom job losses in those 5 years (Zion et al., 2018, 5) – while the wider category of journalists increased their percentage. O’Regan and Young’s figures specify a 20% decline of Australian print journalists over a 30-year period, whereas the number of journalists ‘not further defined’ and journalists ‘not elsewhere classified’ remains on the rise. The authors interpret these findings as an indication of the broadening of journalistic practices, with journalists moving progressively away from reporting professions and taking on a diverse portfolio of roles, largely opened up by the Internet and social media (O’Regan & Young, 2019: 28; Dawson et al., 2021).

Another insight into self-defining tendencies of journalists in Australia is provided by Sherwood & O’Donnell (2018) in ‘Once a journalist, always a journalist?’. Their article sets out to explore journalists’ professional identity in the specific context of job cuts and lay-offs. Based on 266 online surveys of journalists who had lost their job in the 2012–2014 period, the authors coded descriptions of professional identity according to change or no change and divided the answers into three categories of intact, fading and weak. They found that job loss had generated negative feelings towards the journalistic profession, but that this was primarily directed towards the loss of institutional legitimacy. A surprisingly large number still considered themselves ‘journalists at heart’, and many of them used their journalistic skills in ‘new roles – even in those roles that were clearly public relations’ (14). However, their survey did not permit seeking more nuanced response to the claim ‘Once a journalist, always a journalist’. This potentially explains the difference with Nel’s study of 144 laid-off British journalists. Nel found these journalists ‘deeply committed to their profession’ and that their identity as journalists continued as a ‘source of pride, passion and satisfaction’ (Nel, 2010: 21).

These diverse findings underline the fluidity that has always accompanied the efforts of defining who is a journalist or, for that matter, a freelance journalist. Definitional attempts have been made by drawing boundaries, such as in Carlson and Lewis’s (2015)Boundaries of Journalism, based on Bourdieu’s differentiation theory and pitting professional against commercial influences. However, with the economy a pivotal force, this has been seen ‘in large part the story of an impossible autonomy’ (Champagne cited in Benson & Neveu, 2005: 231). The media’s worsening economic situation has further strained these traditional markers of journalism and, as we wish to put forward, cast doubt on their continuing validity.

Örnebring, Karlsson, Fast and Liddell use Bourdieu’s field theory to argue that ‘more emphasis must be placed on the material aspects of journalism: the working conditions and resources available for the individual journalist’ (2018: 4). The authors divide journalistic work into three dimensions, journalistic capital, access to resources, and material security, and are mindful of freelance journalists when discussing these aspects. Theirs is an attempt to match definitions of journalism to deteriorating employment conditions, in which journalistic capital is affected by low access to resources and low material security.

Freelance journalists have only recently been given more room in journalism studies, as the precarious work situation in journalism increases their numbers (Deuze & Witschge, 2020; Hanitzsch & Rick, 2021; Massey & Elmore, 2018; Örnebring, 2018; Örnebring et al., 2018). This attention also inherently acknowledges that the Internet and social media have brought about a more dispersed practice of journalism, running counter to the customary semblance of cohesiveness. Traditional boundaries, based on economic independence and autonomy, are ruptured by the ‘increasingly fragmented, networked, and atypical nature of the labor market for newswork’ (Deuze & Witschge, 2020: 25). Massey and Elmore, in their entry on ‘Freelancing in Journalism’, offer two definitions for freelancers, one being self-definition, the other being a work-test definition. Under work-test, the authors mention, but no longer adhere to, the traditional measure of having to earn more than half one’s income from journalism (Hanusch, 2019) and instead define freelancers as journalists who supply piece work content to media outlets but do not work full time for any of one them (Massey & Elmore, 2018: 2).

Much of the literature on freelance journalists centres on the precarity of their work situation and how this affects the journalism they produce (Gollmitzer, 2014; Mathisen, 2019; Örnebring, 2018). This question is also driven by the recognition that freelance journalism offers increasingly fewer work opportunities, and that freelancers need to look for additional sources of income (McClusky, 2020; Oliver, 2021). This leads to the necessity that many freelancers ‘set themselves up as legally recognized one-person businesses for tax purposes or other reasons’ (Massey & Elmore, 2018: 2). It is this combining of the journalistic and entrepreneurial side which comes most into conflict with the hegemonic journalistic doxa. Autonomy and independence, central parts of journalistic professional identity, are seen as being potentially undermined by the need to self-commodify and promote one’s services. We wish to challenge this traditional casting as outmoded, in particular for freelance journalists.

Coddington’s chapter in Carlson and Lewis’s Boundaries of Journalism acknowledges the difficult terrain of editorial independence from commercial interests at a time when entrepreneurial journalism and native advertising are described as keys to maintaining journalism’s viability. Coddington sees the erosion of this pre-eminent boundary, in American journalism, happening to an extent that ‘[t]he wall becomes a curtain’ (2015: 67). To him, the financial strength of the industry is no longer stable enough ‘to afford … the luxury of ignoring’ the lack of stability (79). Coddington does not mourn the erosion of the news-business boundary and sees other norms, such as transparency and integrity, gaining ground.

Another aspect impacting on freelance journalists is the question of what qualifies as journalism. This issue has long been debated in many quarters, as has the question of ‘Who is a journalist?’ (Hanusch, 2020; Hanitzsch & Vos, 2018; Hermida, 2019; Zelizer, 2004; 2017). From the literature it is obvious that the 20th century focus on news and newsrooms still shapes a large body of Western academic scholarship (Josephi, 2016; Wahl-Jørgensen, 2009) and some still hope that institutional journalism will continue to have impact (e.g. Reese, 2021), even if promises of autonomy ring hollower than ever. Against this backdrop, Hanitzsch and Vos remind us that Western ‘journalism scholarship has been occupied for decades with studying the roles of journalists in the political context’ while other forms of journalism have been marginalized and even ‘occasionally discredited as an unworthy other’ (2018: 147). These authors argue there has been a considerable shift away from public affairs and towards an increased focus on everyday life. They have mapped the roles of journalism in everyday life into three interrelated spaces, ‘consumption, identity and emotion’ (158).

Freelancers, by definition, are placed outside institutional confines, but the perception of their place in journalism has begun to shift. Until recently, only a small number of scholars had called out the distortions created in journalism research by the narrow, newsroom-oriented selection of journalists as the most important object of study (Bromley, 2019; Deuze & Witschge, 2020; Wahl-Jørgensen, 2009). Even at times of institutional strength, Zelizer voiced criticism that research had been directed ‘primarily at a narrow and unrepresentative slice of the journalistic population’, thus excluding the wide range of people working in journalism (2004, 40).

Bromley (2019), who views journalism as an open occupation, calls the oversight of freelancers ‘a significant and fundamental deficiency in our collective exploration and examination of the field’ (14). To him, research that does not include freelancers runs the danger of being ‘potentially unrepresentative of a diversified and multiplex occupation where atypical working has long been commonplace’ (14), highlighting the hierarchy inherent in many research decisions, where categories such as sports, travel and fashion writers, photo and entertainment journalists were excluded from samples, as were freelancers.

Conceptually, our research is guided by Deuze and Witschge’s (2020) attempt to move beyond narrow notions of journalism. Deuze and Witschge turned away from newsroom-centricity and chose to study the activities and discourses of start-ups to show that journalism is turning into a different kind of industry. Their findings emphasize that the boundaries between journalism and other forms communication, such as public relations or corporate communication, have become ‘porous and often meaningless, particularly for media users’ (2020: 11). Yet while the activities of start-up journalists can notably diverge from the western ideal of being at arm’s length from revenue considerations, the discourse about their work has stayed remarkably similar. In their assessment of start-ups, Deuze and Witschge found that the journalists’ pursuit of ‘passion projects’, or stories that matter, overrides any concerns about the simultaneous need for income generation. For this reason, Deuze and Witschge’s analysis of start-up journalists offers a critical point of comparison for our study of freelancers. Despite their different modus operandi, freelancers are akin to start-up journalists in that both inhabit a precarious work situation and have to employ similar strategies of combining editorial and commercial efforts for professional survival.

Research questions

Our research sample comprised 32 self-identified Australian freelance journalists, who were recruited though an ethically framed, open, online invitation to participate in a research project, and had a wide range of intersections with journalism. The diversity of the jobs they did prompted our first research question:

RQ 1: What kind of work are those who self-define as freelance journalists performing?

The timing of our interviews with research participants, in October–November 2020, coincided with substantial, pandemic-related, media industry contraction, publication closures and suspension of freelance budgets. These developments increased the precarity of freelance existence and prompted our second research question:

RQ 2: How has the precarious job situation influenced their work?

At interview, most of our participants revealed they sought employment outside journalism out of necessity. However, since our participants had contacted us in their capacity as freelance journalists, our third research question asks:

RQ 3: How do the freelance journalists display their identity as journalist?

This line of inquiry is central to our endeavour to answer the question, ‘what makes a freelancer specifically a journalist[?]’ (Massey and Elmore, 2018).

Method

As Lauerer and Hanitzsch noted in the as yet largest project investigating journalists globally, the Worlds of Journalism Study, ‘[f]reelancers were hard to identify in most countries’ (2019: 53). This difficulty is reflected in the method chosen for research into freelancers, in that quantitative survey work is rare (Gollmitzer, 2014) and nearly all, including this research, are qualitative studies, based on interviews with freelancers (Mathisen, 2019; Marin-Sanchiz et al., 2021; Norbäck & Styhre, 2019; Salamon, 2020).

Our institution’s research rules favour indirect approaches to participants, which excluded strategic or purposeful sampling. We are fully aware that this did not lead to a representative sample of freelance journalists and therefore cannot be used as generalization to the industry at large.

Our invitation to participate specified that we would ask open-ended questions about the experience of self-employment, the frequency, mode and type of freelance work, the perceptions of change in income possibilities and professional identity over the past 3 years, and a question about collegiality, which permitted us to gauge our participants’ involvement with the journalistic community.

This invitation was posted on publicly available high-profile Australian networking sites, such as freeline.net.au and thefreelancecollective.com.au, and was, without our involvement, further circulated on social media, mailing lists or by word of mouth. We included all participants who volunteered as they met the criteria set out in our letter of invitation posted on websites. The reach was Australia-wide, with participants from each state and territory of Australia. While seven participants lived in regional areas with often limited local media, the other 25 lived and worked in the capital cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Canberra, Hobart or Darwin, which host bigger media markets. Of the 32 participants, 23 were women and 9 men. The semi-structured interviews of about 30 min duration were conducted on Zoom, and the interview transcriptions made available to the participants to confirm the intention of their responses.

Subsequently, we undertook several rounds of qualitative coding (Kvale, 2007), structuring the body of our data into themes and then excerpts to establish our categories of analysis and supporting evidence. In line with established human research ethics protocols, the interview transcripts were anonymized to protect the privacy of the participants, and, accordingly, our findings are presented in a way that does not identify any individual participant either by name or other identity markers.

Our findings are set out in the following seven sections: diversity of journalistic work; freelancers’ overall work portfolios; effects of the highly precarious work situation; defining as a journalist; journalistic skills outplaying journalistic values; high social capital and space for creativity.

Findings

Diversity of journalistic work

In journalism studies, for a long time, research focused almost exclusively on the newsrooms of institutional mass media (Hermida, 2019; Wahl-Jørgensen, 2009) and the journalists who worked in them. Freelancers were thus considered to be ‘in the margins of journalism’ (Örnebring & Möller, 2018), as their work was perceived to be ancillary to the central business of news reporting and editorial writing. They were seen as providing content for lifestyle supplements, feature stories, theatre and book reviews, but also articles on science, health and education (Massey & Elmore, 2018).

In our findings, this perception still holds when looking at the jobs our participants performed during and prior to the pandemic, but only to a degree. In answer to our first research question – what kind of work are those who self-define as freelance journalists performing? – we found a considerable diversity of journalistic work among our participants, including a broader than expected range of specialist topics.

Of those who conformed closely to the commonly held image of freelancers, two wrote for magazines about parenting and lifestyle, health and fitness. Four worked in the arts and culture area, one highly specialized in her field, the others covering a wider range of literature, music, film, the visual arts and television. Their articles appear in mainstream digital and print media, or in magazines dedicated to the particular art form they are reviewing or writing about. The same went for the travel writer. The restaurant reviewer cum food writer had regular columns in her local paper. One participant had written on digital technology, that is, reviewing new products for the public, and another on enterprise technology and start-ups. Two participants wrote for popular science magazines, locally and internationally; another covered automotive technology and motorsport. Of the four freelancers in sport, one was a photographer and another put together ‘fair dealing’ match packages in video form for a major digital media outlet. The other two were highly specialized in their respective sports. Two participants wrote in the area of education; one participant concentrated on personal finance, another on the seniors’ demographic.

More broadly, the regional and rural freelance reporters were focussed on the problems and profiles of their local community, one with emphasis on how climate change was affecting her particular region. Two were freelance photographers; another wrote in the highly specialized field of new developments in digital and visual effects in film. His clientele was entirely overseas, mostly in the United States of America. Two worked as journalist–researchers on television entertainment programs where, in one case, the job entailed finding news topics for the target demographic of the show and, in the other, checking stories and facts for a popular satirical program. One freelancer was working on a major investigative story thanks to a grant. Another had produced a highly successful podcast dealing with the case of a missing person. Two others produced podcasts for a subscriber base, on topics dealing with social justice, gender equity, domestic violence and cyber hate. One freelancer covered traditional political issues, contributing to a weekly political radio program, and publishing a weekly column on local political issues.

In sum, our study found self-defined freelance journalists engaged in a broader than expected variety of journalistic jobs across diverse specialist topics. Yet, only one was connected to the dominant connotation for journalists – news – and, in that regard, our cohort conformed to the commonly held and traditional image of freelancers.

Freelancers’ overall work portfolios

This snapshot of Australian freelancers would be incomplete, however, if we did not outline all the types of jobs that our participants took on. Massey and Elmore (2018), in their entry on ‘Freelancing in Journalism’, emphasize the precarity inherent in freelancing. In their last paragraph under the heading ‘Types of Work’, they mention some of the other jobs performed by freelancers, such as copy editors and photographers, adding that the freelancers ‘should expect to take public relations (PR) assignments at some point in their self-employment career’ (2018: 7). With this statement Massey and Elmore echo the customary binary of journalism and public relations (Fröhlich et al., 2013; Kester & Prenger, 2021), but do not take up the now more common instances of sponsored content or advertorial writing (Carlson, 2015; Coddington, 2015; Serazio, 2021).

Our findings show that many of the freelancers did content writing for corporate clients. This included ghost writing thought-leadership pieces or other texts, which the client placed under her or his name on LinkedIn or Facebook. Others turned to content editing, sometimes in the journalistic sphere, but also subbing for websites or editing fiction and non-fiction books. Some wrote sponsored articles or produced multimedia documentary segments for distribution on YouTube, Facebook or TikTok. As income possibilities dried up in 2020, due to pandemic-related media contraction, two participants took jobs in industry sectors that were totally unrelated to journalism, while another two found work in communications-related fields, such as working for a Senator or a Royal Commission. In such cases, journalism became a second job, ‘on the side’.

Effects of the highly precarious work situation

At the time of interview, only four out of 32 freelancers said they could live fully off freelance journalism. For many of the others, the pandemic had further undermined their already insecure financial situation, leading us to our second research question, how has the precarious job situation influenced their work?

Two participants were unaffected by the COVID-19 crisis. One of the science writers had more work than she could cope with and the other was one of the journalist–researcher for a television show. For several others, all work had dropped away. For example, with travel and sports events halted, contracts for travel and sports writers and photographers, dried up. Like many people in the same situation in other lines work, freelancers could access income support through the Australian government’s JobKeeper and JobSeeker programs. Ten of our participants accessed government assistance, and others became more dependent on their partners.

Many magazines had completely stopped commissioning freelancers, and other magazines had considerably lowered their pay-rates. Professional writing or consulting work for corporate or government clients had also fallen away. One photographer struck it lucky in that a major media house had laid off all its photographers, using freelance labour instead. This pushed up his journalistic output to 85% of his total work. Most of the other freelance journalists, however, had to turn to their communications jobs or to totally unrelated work to see themselves through this period of severe downturn.

Defining as journalist

Our increased awareness of the difficult circumstances many freelancers faced in 2020, led us to further reflect on their willingness to participate in our research project. Two issues stood out: first, their actual work situations at the time of interview were unexpectedly multifaceted and, second, despite this complexity, they self-identified as freelance journalists. For this reason, in our third research question, we considered how the freelance journalists displayed their identity as journalists.

Zelizer has pointed out that scholars and journalists talk differently about journalism. Our participants referred directly or indirectly to three of the seven metaphors Zelizer identifies as commonly used by journalists, namely, ‘journalism as story’, ‘journalism as service’ and ‘journalism as engagement’ (2017: 12–24). This is an interesting finding, because Zelizer’s metaphors are strongly linked to daily news reporting, a role that was not applicable to any of the freelance journalists in our study. Yet our participants were also highly conscious of the distinction between themselves and news reporters as exemplified by one participant. When asked whether he saw himself as a journalist, replied with a question of his own, ‘Do you mean a journalist in news or a writer?’

Further probing of our participants’ answers showed their work situation had less influence on defining their identity than the degree to which they had been socialized into journalism, most frequently in newsrooms. To many of those who had trained as journalists, the dividing line between journalism and other writing was clear, even if they had been pushed through circumstance into content provision. Journalistic principles were firmly embedded in their minds, even if they found less of a chance to apply them. The aspects mentioned were, that as a journalist, ‘you’re writing strictly around facts’ and “you’re writing how you saw it from your point of view’ – and not the client’s. Those who, at the time of the interview, were full time freelance journalists, mentioned attentiveness towards conflicts of interest, whereas some of those surviving on writing sponsored content, experienced ‘moral dilemmas’. Some resorted to compartmentalizing. As one participant put it:

I purposefully keep a wall between the two sides but that’s not necessarily the case with clients. There are an increasing number of clients, particularly in this world of content marketing, who seem to think that it’s okay for you to write something that will please the client … If I’m a journalist my audience is the dominant decision maker of what I write.

Others brought up that the knowledge of what journalism stands for is shared only between journalists in that there is ‘an understanding and a value to what we are doing’. This ‘shared sense of professionalism’ (Carlson, 2015) is created through collective recognition, also conferring ‘a sense of belonging’ (Deuze & Witschge, 2020: 96). Some, however, see that knowledge resting mainly with institutions. As one interviewee said,

Journalism is incredibly important to our society and incredibly threatened. I don’t think freelancing is the only future for journalism. Freelancers play a really important role, they’re part of an ecosystem, but without staff journalists and secure roles in journalism that allow training, development and continuity, then journalism is really going to be in trouble.

Her hope for journalism was firmly placed on some continuation of ‘institutional coherence’ (Reese, 2021: 175).

Journalistic skills outplaying journalistic values

Not every one of our participants drew such distinct lines around journalism. For some, their facility to write clearly and in an attractive way was a major impulse to see themselves as much as a writer as a journalist. Another reason for not drawing a clear distinction between journalist and writer was their perception that the public had an imperfect grasp of what constitutes journalism and non-journalism roles (see Carlson, 2015; Fisher et al., 2021). As one participant put it, ‘it’s very hard to gauge as to what our professional identity is out there’.

These participants made little distinction between journalistic and professional writing. Without second thought, they counted native advertising as journalism or bundled all their work, be it journalism or promotional writing, under the label of writing.

For most of our participants who described themselves as ‘writer’ rather than as ‘journalist’, the motive was matching their branding to work availability. As one of them said, ‘I would call myself a journalist … if I could get more journalism work’. Others took the strategic decision to label themselves as ‘writer’ because they wanted ‘to encompass as much as possible’ in an increasingly overcrowded job market. As another participant said, ‘the mastheads were laying off big numbers. … [With] suddenly redundant journos all looking for freelance, just recognising the saturated market, I started looking at the marketing and commercial side of writing’.

These definitional choices indicated that the term ‘journalist’ was seen by some as a narrower specialization than ‘writer’ and, therefore, less likely to attract work in a job market filled with ‘redundant’ journalists. Under those circumstances it was unsurprising that those freelancers who needed or wanted secure incomes, chose to widen their appeal by indicating that they would take on professional writing jobs shaped by the client’s content brief.

The answers we collected from those who self-defined as journalists suggested to us, first, that the descriptor ‘freelancer’ may have trumped the descriptor ‘journalist’ and, second, that the identity of a ‘journalist’ and a ‘writer’ were not seen as mutually exclusive (Salamon, 2020). One of the participants, after explaining why he called himself a writer for employment reasons, then added, ‘I first and foremost identify personally, and to anyone who asks me, as a journalist’. To him, earning money elsewhere did not interfere with his professional calling:

I’ve always said to any journalist who approaches me for advice, is not to be ashamed of that too much. Money is money wherever it comes from. A lot of us do extra things, whether it be working in a bar, whether it be doing corporate copywriting for web sites. Be open to and understand that sometimes you do things that you don’t love for financial stability, and it shouldn’t demean what you do for your passion.

High social capital

Evidence of persistent attachment to the journalist identity supports the notion that the label of journalist holds social capital. Bourdieu defines social capital as ‘the sum of resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or a group by possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationship of mutual acquaintances and recognition’ (Benson & Neveu, 2005: 21). Previous research has not explored this aspect, and we wanted to find out how much social, and by extension journalistic, capital our participants held in terms of recognition.

Almost half of the freelance journalists we interviewed had won state, national and even international, awards, including a Walkley, Australia’s highest journalism award (Walkley Awards, 2021). Some had done so when they were still working as full time journalists, but more than half of the award winners had done so while being freelancers. Another quarter had published books. This led us to conclude that, compared to other studies on freelancers (Mathisen, 2019; Örnebring & Möller, 2018; Sherwood & O’Donnell, 2018), we were not talking to those who felt largely abandoned by journalism or had abandoned journalism, but to a cohort with a noticeable commitment to public interest journalism and considerable journalistic capital (Örnebring et al., 2018).

Within this group of freelancers, several had received recognition for their science writing or education writing, for arts criticism and travel writing. Others had been given awards for regional and rural reporting and for being the best freelance journalist in their state. The work winning Walkley awards focused on significant social issues, such as Australia’s treatment of refugees, highlighting injustices for people with disability, addressed aspects of climate change, or dealt with child abuse and cyber hate. A number of these were radio (podcast) awards or, for example, given for an innovative Instagram documentary. The latter indicate an increasing turn towards making use of digital affordances to tell ‘stories that matter’. Deuze and Witschge, who use that phrase for one of their chapter titles, found among start-up journalists ‘a clear sense of what they wish to contribute [and] how they wish to fill a certain gap’ (2020, 118). Our award-winning participants expressed similar sentiments. To them, journalism is imbued with civic values, which they wish to further. This indicates a strong correlation between being highly cognizant of journalistic norms and earning awards. However, the dividing line between journalist and writer, not only in our sample, is fluid. A significant number of journalists are also authors.

Space for creativity

We found that work availability was not the only reason participants gave for calling themselves ‘writer’ rather than ‘journalist’. Some did so, attracted to the idea of exercising greater creative freedom. Despite self-defining as journalists and working in journalistic jobs, two participants who had come to freelance journalism through blogging and not newsrooms, decidedly saw themselves as writers. For them, freelance journalism provided opportunities to showcase their engaging writing skills and specialized knowledge. One participant, who had previously studied creative writing, claimed her knowledge of the mechanics of storytelling made her texts ‘a little more compelling than [those by] someone who was primarily trained as a journalist’, before adding, ‘I never trained as a journalist, so I consider myself a writer’.

Digital affordances have thrown news and information provision wide open, not only permitting but decidedly asking for creative ways of engaging with audiences. In our study, those freelance writers, podcasters or photographers who were less bound to newsroom protocols, were able to react more freely to the demands of audience engagement, by responding with more personalized journalism. In their view, calling themselves writers set them apart from the neutral voices of news journalists.

Discussion

Our study confirms precarity as the salient aspect of freelancing. This has repercussions on the perception by scholars of freelance journalists (Massey & Elmore, 2018; Örnebring et al., 2018) and how freelance journalists see themselves and self-identify.

For many Australian freelancers, employment possibilities in journalism are limited and this necessitates other sources of income. In the eyes of some scholars, this loosens the ties between freelancers and journalism to the degree that it is difficult to distinguish freelance journalists from self-employed media workers (Massey & Elmore, 2018). Yet, our research finds otherwise. We argue that carrying out journalistic and professional writing side by side does not necessarily detract from a freelance journalist’s commitment to the norms, practices and values of journalism (Gollmitzer, 2014; Örnebring, 2018). On the contrary, our study shows that a freelancer’s bond to journalism rests more on their training in journalism and sense of belonging to a community of journalists, than on the conventional definition of who is a journalist based on the percentage of income earned from news work (see Hanitzsch et al., 2019)

The freelancer’s need to self-commodify, promote and, at the same time, publish also raises questions about journalistic identity (Coddington, 2015; Deuze & Witschge, 2020). This mixing of commercial and editorial elements contravenes notions of editorial independence that have long been regarded as the cornerstone of journalistic autonomy. However, in the digital era, the advertising-editorial division is challenged, in that entrepreneurial journalism and native advertising have undercut the absolute model of editorial independence. It was industry, not journalists, that broke down the ‘wall’ separating editorial and promotional content and demanded articles that have been described as ‘advertising wearing the uniform of journalism’ (Carr cited in Coddington, 2015: 76). What had been a line in the sand, has been erased by the sharp wind of financial necessity and social and digital media influence (Carlson, 2015), not only for newsroom journalists but also, by extension, for freelance journalists. While entrepreneurial journalism is less of a feature in Australian media than it is in the United States of America (Holton, 2016), native advertising, or sponsored content, has become a firm part of many freelancers’ work.

The advent of native advertising, in our observation, has largely contributed to a blurring of lines between journalism and content provision. About half of our participants made little distinction between the two forms, nor were they concerned by pursuing both styles in their work. This attitude was underpinned, in the view of some participants, by the public showing little understanding of the difference between traditional and non-traditional journalism roles (Fisher et al., 2021). Given that almost half of our participants shared in this less-bounded notion of journalism, it was understandable that they self-defined as freelance journalists, a result that suggests the blurring of journalistic boundaries had become normalized among them.

Örnebring et al. (2018), applying Bourdieu’s field theory, developed a theoretical model of the space of journalistic work. The authors assign differing levels of journalistic capital, access to resources and material security and assume it unlikely that those leading precarious working lives outside institutions, with low material security and low access to resources, are able to attain high journalistic capital. High journalistic capital is demonstrated through recognition, for example, by winning ‘a national journalistic prize’ (Høvden cited in Örnebring et al., 2018: 409). Our study leads us to contend that freelancers can achieve high journalistic capital with almost half of our participants having been presented with regional, national and international prizes while being freelancers. Those working in audio, video or photography were proportionally more likely to garner awards, indicating that the freelancers’ freedom to exercise their creativity may have been to their advantage.

Several of them leveraged the material resources for their highly regarded journalistic work through other jobs. Deuze and Witschge (2020: 60) describe this kind of journalism as a ‘passion project’, a term which denotes ‘people’s profound engagement’ with their work. In our study, we found numerous examples of ‘passion work’. For example, two of our participants had been overseas, pursuing self-funded ‘passion projects’, in Gaza and Africa, respectively, when the pandemic broke out. Others had self-funded the investigation phase of their later award-winning journalism through work in the corporate sector. This group shared in the bounded notion of journalism and its values, such as journalistic independence. Thus, while our sample confirms the freelance journalists’ disjuncture from daily news provision, it contains numerous examples of award-winning investigative work and instances of high journalistic capital.

Another indication of the blurring lines of journalism was the decision of freelancers to call themselves writers. Several did so to open up broader work choices. Others, despite doing journalistic work, saw themselves in a different mould. In particular, the two participants who came to write for major media outlets via their blogs, wanted to be known as writers. For these participants, among the youngest in our cohort, journalism no longer had the attraction or clout that it maintained for the older participants. Instead, the term ‘writer’ better defined and captured their individual writing skills, unique voice and specialist knowledge. In adopting this label, which may be seen as an attempt at distinctive professional branding, these freelancers also consciously rejected the ‘in-group’ appeal of the journalistic identity.

Conclusion

Mass media, with its newsroom centricity, no longer sets the frame of a journalist’s position in journalism. With the institutional backing of core journalistic values waning (Reese, 2021), some changes lead away from the ‘ideal-type value system’ (Deuze, 2005, 444); other shifts open new possibilities. Multiple digital ways of providing and accessing news and stories have flattened the long-standing hierarchy that had formed in journalism studies (Hermida, 2019; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2009). A more dispersed and individualized provision of information and narratives through a multitude of channels has given freelance journalists, despite job precarity, a new standing. We found freelance journalists performing a wide variety of tasks, both as journalists and as media workers. But we contend that placing these two categories into a binary creates a false dichotomy. Our study demonstrated that freelance journalists can hold high journalistic capital, while at the same time providing professional writing content to corporate clients. They can be investigative reporters, deeply concerned with social ills, or hold specialist knowledge which they convey in accessible and newly creative ways.

The changing working modes of freelance journalists should lead to a rethinking of some of journalism’s norms, such as a journalist’s autonomous editorial judgement needing to be based on sole commitment to journalism. We found the importance of having a sense of belonging to a community of journalists outweighed any work-test definitions (Deuze & Witschge, 2020). For freelancers who see themselves as journalists, loyalty to the traditional journalistic value system is strong, but this adherence was by no means shared by all participants in the study. Among two younger freelancers, we observed a waning of the attraction to be seen as journalist. For those, who pursued individualized branding, be it in writing, podcasting or other digital ventures, labelling themselves as journalist was no longer the imperative option, a move that will need further exploration. For them, the connotation of journalist as objective, disembodied reporter stands in the way of a stronger, personalized engagement with their audience. Their choice of defining as writer emphasizes their understanding of journalist as creative worker.

Our investigation into the kinds of work that freelance journalists are performing, and how they display and articulate their identity, highlights outdated constraints in the traditional scholarly notion of who is a journalist. We conclude that a more inclusive concept of journalism is needed to capture the different modes of work and higher degree of individualism and creativity, found among the ever-increasing number of a-typical journalism workers.

Author biographies

Dr. Beate Josephi is Honorary Associate of the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. Journalists and journalism and democracy have been focal points of her research.

Dr. Penny O’Donnell is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. She has published widely on the disrupted lives of journalists.

ORCID iDs

Beate Josephi https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1954-5230

Penny O’Donnell https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1232-3603